Political Cynic on the King & Headline:’Prince Charles accepted €1m cash in suitcase from sheikh’!
Sep 21, 2025
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Editor: Look what Tina Brown missed!
June 25 2022
Headline: Prince Charles accepted €1m cash in suitcase from sheikh
Sub-headline: Heir to the throne sent money from former Qatari prime minister to his foundation
The Prince of Wales accepted a suitcase containing €1 million in cash from a controversial Qatari politician, The Sunday Times can reveal.
It was one of three lots of cash, totalling €3 million, which Prince Charles personally received from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar who is nicknamed “HBJ”, between 2011 and 2015.
On one occasion, Sheikh Hamad, 62, presented the prince with €1 million, which was reportedly stuffed into carrier bags from Fortnum & Mason, the luxury department store that has a royal charter to provide the prince’s groceries and tea.
On another, Charles, 73, accepted a holdall containing €1 million during a private one-on-one meeting at Clarence House in 2015. On Saturday night Clarence House said the money was “passed immediately to one of the prince’s charities who carried out the appropriate covenants and assured us that all the correct processes were followed”.
After the heir to the throne accepted the small suitcase, it was given to two advisers in the royal household who hand-counted the money. It was said to be in the form of €500 notes — a denomination dubbed the “bin Laden” because of its link to terrorist financing, and which has since been discontinued.
Palace aides then asked Coutts to collect the cash. The private bank, which is headquartered in the Strand in central London, and has served the royal family for centuries, is understood to have retrieved the suitcase from Charles’s London residence.
Each payment was deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF), a low-profile grant-making entity which bankrolls the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. There is no suggestion the payments were illegal.
The prince’s meetings with Sheikh Hamad do not appear in the Court Circular, the list of official engagements undertaken by working royals.
The royal gift policy states that members of the royal family are allowed to accept a “cheque” as a patron of, or on behalf of, a charity. It is silent on cash.
There are questions over a “cash-for-access” culture at Clarence House, with the Metropolitan Police and Charity Commission investigating fundraising practices, including the sale of honours. Last year The Sunday Times reported that Michael Fawcett, Charles’s closest confidant, fixed an honour for a Saudi billionaire. There is no evidence the sheikh did not intend the monies to go to the charity and Sheikh Hamad did not comment on Saturday.
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Editor: Tina is having too much fun with Trump as Comic Interest, in her collection of comments about Trump’s dull-wittedness: Brown places Trump in evocatine historical positions, to comic effect for the NYT reader. Who recalls her time at ‘The Dailey Beast’ as editor from October 2008 September 2013?
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The Daily Beast Tries to Claw Its Way Back to Relevance
Can Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood revive the once-buzzy news site and reclaim their perches atop the New York media world? Their own staff isn’t sure.
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The Daily Beast, launched in 2008 by the longtime magazine editor Tina Brown and backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, became known over the years as a cheeky and aggressive tabloid with reporting on politics and national security that often had an impact belying the relatively small size of its newsroom.
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Political Cynic.
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